Ad Exec Arrested For Removing Illegal Roadside Advertisements

from the please-explain dept

It's no secret that we live in an age of aggressive (and perhaps excessive) advertising. Advertising is absolutely everywhere -- and apparently one ad exec got fed up. He discovered one of those "street side" signs that advertisers stick into the ground alongside roads on his own property. He removed it and then began removing many more. He called up local authorities who told him that it was illegal to place those signs on private property or on public property, but said they didn't have the resources to go around removing them. That seemed like an opportunity, so he began removing them -- sometimes calling the companies advertised in the signs to offer his services as an ad exec to provide more effective, less annoying, advertisements (not surprisingly, none have taken him up on the offer). However, for some reason, he's now been arrested for theft over the signs. It's not clear if the article is leaving out some sort of detail or what, but it's hard to see how removing an illegal advertising sign should be considered theft.

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No, Lucille, in fact, you completely missed the point. My comment clearly related to CA Cop's statement of "get creative to find a law he may have violated by offering his own services in place of the ads" NOT the ad exec getting arrested in the first place. Although now that I think about it some more I guess CA Cop is really taking the role of judge, since his "getting creative" really amounts to law interpretation, which is what judges do. So he's still overstepping his bounds and doing more than simple law enforcement - and that's just not right and is possibly a major reason people sometimes have problems with cop behavior.